VOTE FOR YOUR LIFE

By Ellie Varley

Launched in April 2019, Vote For Your Future is a cross-party campaign with the sole purpose of ensuring that more young people are registering to vote and participating in the democratic process. Recent analysis by the youth-led campaign, Vote For Your Future shows that record levels of young people, are finding their political voice, and are registering to vote.

When young people reach voting age most are going through significant change, for example, moving to University, moving out, starting their first job or sometimes a combination of all. All of these changes are affected by Politics in some shape or form - from paying University fees to the introduction of Apprenticeships or Zero Contract Hours, therefore it is important young people contribute to democracy in an informed way. With the twist and turmoil to the political landscape brought on by Brexit, this is more important than ever and it would appear Brexit has encouraged more young people to find their voice and join the debate.

Joining Vote for Your Future was something of the utmost importance to me. Not only am I working to ensure that more people my age, engage in politics and voting - something I view as second nature, but I am also working with activists from various parties and Brexit campaigns to create positive change. It is giving me a well-rounded experience.

For those that cannot understand why I continue to vote, and to those who say: “I don’t vote, my vote doesn’t count to anything’, I want to explain why voting is important to me as a young person.

Voting is the first step in our democracy and is right we take for granted. By participating in local elections to elect your Local Councillor you are determining how much council tax you pay, how that money is spent, and whether your bins are collected weekly or monthly. At a national level, when you vote for your Member of Parliament or Party, you are voting on laws, and policies which govern the Country. Whether you are passionate about climate change or low level letterboxes - your vote shapes your future. Every election is shaped by those who turn up.

Young people have consistently fallen short at the ballot box and Vote For Your Future has started to change that.

We understand that political engagement and understanding is synonymous with political investment. When questioned, those who chose not to vote often claim that they don’t understand who to vote for. For this reason, I would like to see more education in schools and information in the public domain, even if it is as basic as how to vote. I feel this would bring confidence to young people, so they get out to the ballot booth and feel they can make an informed decision.

We are constantly talked about as the reason for MPs voting a certain way to protect our futures, as opposed to spoken to. This approach needs to change. Those who will inherit the future determined by MPs in Westminster should be out there shaping it. Our campaign has reached out to other youth campaigns across the country and have support from UK Youth, My Life My Say, Students For Brexit, Shoutout UK and Our Future Our Choice.

Our message is simple: “We as a generation have the power to change the course of history, and the first step we can take in doing so is to vote”.

THE LEFT HAVE CREATED A CULTURE OF EXTREMISM

By Shabnam Nasimi

Who knew that there was so much hate within the Left?

I grew up listening to my dad, a refugee from terrorism in Afghanistan teach me the evils of hatred and prejudice. And that led to me, as a teenager to become active in political and social activism determined to fight extremism. I would never have believed that the party of equality and social justice has become a racist party. It is because of Jeremy Corbyn and the people around him that the party has turned what was a mainstream political party into something really very different. They have created a culture of extremism, intolerance and bullying and it’s unbelievable that decent people, who have devoted their entire lives to mainstream politics are being driven out.

The Left no longer debate: they try to annihilate the other side, destroy opponents and get them fired from their jobs. It’s barbaric and it is profoundly illiberal. Our discourse has mutated into a holy war, with the Left convinced that the other side is not just wrong but also self-evidently morally inferior. It’s a horrendous, civilisation-imperilling regression.

Jeremy Corbyn routinely claims Conservative policies are “killing people”. John McDonnell talks about “lynching” female Tory MPs and in 2010 he praised violent thugs as “the best of our movement” for “kicking the shit” out of Conservative Campaign Headquarters.

Other Labour MPs use similar language every day while turning a blind eye to anti-Semitic and misogynistic bullying in their own party. Lib Dems sing about killing Tony Blair at their conference, promise to “decapitate” Boris Johnson in his constituency, and proudly say “bollocks to Brexit.” And Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, poses for photographs with campaigners in “F*ck Boris” t-shirts.  

Just three years after the killing of Labour MP Jo Cox on the streets of Britain, the depiction of a murdered politician has no place in British politics.

Britain and our political system were reputed around the world as the cradle of democracy, tolerance and downright decency. No longer. The Left has destroyed our civilised and tolerant political discourse to violence in our streets directed at people who have different points of view.

The threat is no longer Brexit, but Labour. In my opinion, Britain will survive leaving the EU, especially with a deal. But even the danger of crashing out would be nothing compared to that of rule by an extremist Labour Party. I dearly hope Brexit is delivered but the political crisis will not end until the hate and contempt of the extreme Left towards other political views is resolved. This has to change if we want people, particularly young people, to have faith in politics and Westminster again.

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A KITCHEN AT THE TATE MODERN?

By Fleur Butler

Walking around Tate Modern endless signs proclaim that there are not enough female artists on display but ironically the Tate often chooses female art in terms of its own oppression at being unheard. Unlike the Tate, prime space is given to the work of the anonymous New York female artists Guerrilla Girls and their appalling statistics on how few women artists make it. But curators misunderstand the problem if they think that this is the solution!

It isn’t just that women are oppressed in the world; it is that their very interests are seen as “uninteresting” to the curators, who have been trained by male-led academies for centuries. The Tate needs to start to listen to women and their interests if they are to overcome this gender imbalance. It’s not that women are not artists; it’s just that the Tate does not notice them. They do not hear the language of the domestic, caring, nurturing; or of love, private space, interior pain, the home and family that so many people experience. Being female is not all about oppression as left-wing feminists would have you believe, being female is being proud of female distinctions, and creating a world in which both men and women can explore their feminine natures.  If art isn’t the best medium to explore these issues than what is? Where is the feminine in art?

There are many artists, male and female, who are not on show because they have refused to produce work within the masculine definitions of “good” art. It is these artists who are the true feminists of the art world, not the ranting left wing with their pictures of rape, violence and oppression. Is this all the Tate think women are about? Can’t they see these artists speak a different female truth, on the sidelines of a monolingual male art world?

Such mistakes are everywhere: Leonora Carrington died only a few years ago as Britain’s most successful female artist but the Tate has only one picture on display. Carrington is known for her weird and mystical animal world, her powerful female figures, giantesses standing over the world, and witches concocting spells together on a cheery domestic hearth. The Tate never bought her or saw her as important. Even today they have not allowed Leonora Carrington through their hallowed doors into London. Her retrospective was at Tate Liverpool, an apologia for one of Britain’s greatest 20th Century artists, female or otherwise.  

The explorations of female pain against a hurtful world of love gone wrong is another ignored experience. Isobel Brigham paints her naked women in their private domestic space as a retreat from the male world.  The very softness and detail of cushion on which female forms can lie naked explores the strength and peacefulness of a world absent of men. So different from the voyeuristic work of Walter Sickert and the Camden Hill School, who peered at women in their private settings and painted weird and imprisoned images. Prisons or refuges? The domestic can be seen in many ways. And what about those artists who paint kitchens, why do we never see kitchens at Tate Modern? Or pots and pans.  If we can have a urinal, surely a frying pan is allowed.

Dame Laura Knight,

Artist, circa 1910

An alternative Tate Modern show would not have Modigliani being hailed as a feminist just because he liked pubic hair, but would show the longing innocence of the Windrush painter, Enid Richardson. Her art was chosen by the Caribbean female community in the Pepperpot Club in Nottinghill. They would show not Augustus John, and his dubious female images, all about to be ravished in real life by him, but Gwen John and her painful introspective female figures, often silenced by male society. Laura Knight would be welcomed, not because she is “safe” and didn’t shock the men at the Royal Academy, but for her depictions of women and nature. The interior stillness of the girl on the cliff of “dark pools” is an experience of many women who don’t rage in pain, but stand still and absorb shock. Or Winifred Nicholson, who was allowed to be Ben Nicholson’s muse until he ran off with the brilliant Barbara Hepworth. Her art explored children, kitchen tables, lights, simple beauty in flowers, her life is the real experience of deserted mothers, but an experience dismissed by Tate Modern as irrelevant.   Only the subtle tactile sculptures of Hepworth got past the anti-feminine, merely alluding to the female desire to caress and touch not as a sexual act but as an act of love of landscape, people and things.

And central would be Leonora Carrington’s witches stirring their cauldron of power, nurturing sustenance for the home dwellers and creating power as safety and peace for childlike beings to grow and change and develop under the strength of the female mother form. A real feminist vision of art.